At the Ruth send-off, a photo of him standing on the third base line, his back to the camera, a baseball cap in one hand and his bat in the other, planted in the ground, won the Pulitzer Prize for news photography. The photo shows players lined up across from Ruth on the first base line, caps on their chests, alongside kneeling photographers; in the distance are tens of thousands of fans filling all three decks of the ballpark, below a fittingly gray sky. It appeared on the front page of the next day’s New York Herald Tribune, Ruth’s number surrounded by pinstripes — with no last name on the jersey, a Yankees tradition that survives to this day. It’s called “The Babe Bows Out.”
“He looked tired, very tired,” photographer Nat Fein recalled in “Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs.”
“The power that had been his in his youth and manhood was slowly ebbing away. … It was a dull day, and most photographers were using flash bulbs, but I slowed the shutter and took the picture without a flash.”
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